Guild Wars 2

Snoxx.7943:

- Staff clones do not get an extra bounce (unfortunately that’s what we were hoping for)

Hmm, might want to retest that. <evil grin> Well they don’t from IE if that’s what you meant, but they sure do from regular attacks now.

Snoxx.7943:

- unfortunately, boons are worthless on clones
(might on a clone doesn’t increase it’s bleed damage)

No but Fury on a Clone causes it to crit more, and more crits is more bleeds if you’re traited for that.

All in all this is a big boost to condie mesmers, because Staff clones apply lots more conditions now. The same goes for iMage, it works a lot better since the patch. I think the bounce speed has been upped or something, it’s all just working better for me then before.

So I think this was a condie-Mesmer love patch. Looks like GS took an indirect hit.

Windwalker.7421:

Hmm, might want to retest that. <evil grin> Well they don’t from IE if that’s what you meant, but they sure do from regular attacks now.

Unless it’s happening strictly against targets that aren’t the practice dummies in LA or the golems in HotM, you’re mistaken.

EDIT: Also, giving Fury to the Clones is actually worse than getting it yourself. Stats auto-filter down to Illusions, so giving yourself Might/Fury also gives the Clones ‘virtual’ Might/Fury.

So, yeah, it’s a straight nerf there.

Fuschia.6573:

Windwalker.7421:

Hmm, might want to retest that. <evil grin> Well they don’t from IE if that’s what you meant, but they sure do from regular attacks now.

Unless it’s happening strictly against targets that aren’t the practice dummies in LA or the golems in HotM, you’re mistaken.

EDIT: Also, giving Fury to the Clones is actually worse than getting it yourself. Stats auto-filter down to Illusions, so giving yourself Might/Fury also gives the Clones ‘virtual’ Might/Fury.

So, yeah, it’s a straight nerf there.

Actually no, because you can give them both the virtual and actual fury allowing them to have +40% critical chance.

Of course, the fact that you getting +20% applies to 4 units instead of 1 is an alarmingly larger stat boost than +20% to a single player, assuming you have 3 clones out, you should theoretically be able to get fury on 2-3 units, so if one of them is you, you now have 1-2 clones with 40% crit chance and 2-3 units with 20% crit chance.

Esplen.3940:

Actually no, because you can give them both the virtual and actual fury allowing them to have +40% critical chance.

Of course, the fact that you getting +20% applies to 4 units instead of 1 is an alarmingly larger stat boost than +20% to a single player, assuming you have 3 clones out, you should theoretically be able to get fury on 2-3 units, so if one of them is you, you now have 1-2 clones with 40% crit chance and 2-3 units with 20% crit chance.

Let’s put it this way…

Fury is fine on Illusions, but better on yourself. If you have three Illusions out, it’s four times better.

Previously, all bounces went to the player in a solo situation, if at all possible. With a bit of boon duration you have a nice, reliable 100% Fury that applies to yourself and three Illusions.

Now, all bounces go towards the closest target. Could be you, could be your Illusions. If it hits one of your Illusions, your effect is at 25% of what it was. If it hits you, it’s the same.

Taking only that into account it’s obviously a nerf, as you simply won’t be able to constantly stay the closest bounce target in anything approaching a fair fight. Even if it’s only occasionally after you use Phase Retreat, you’re still missing some Fury you otherwise could have had.

You point out that you could, theoretically, get Fury up on yourself and several Illusions at once to turn the change into an increase in power.

Could you? Sure.

Will you? Almost never.

Why? Because in order to get it to work, you need a specific setup – one where you can manipulate the position of both yourself and your clones in relation to your main target, and can do so reliably enough to get Fury on multiple targets at once.

In PvE you might be able to easily manage yourself and one Illusion having Fury up all the time, but in any WvW or sPvP/tPvP setting you simply aren’t going to have that sort of control over how the fight plays out. You’ll even have trouble getting it to work in plenty of harder instances, as you already have to work pretty hard to not put Phantasms right into AoE so they can do any damage at all.

GS #2 also bounces off of critters now o.O

Fury on the player does not affect illusion crit chance, unless that got changed in this patch too.

The Staff bounce on a clone giving fury COULD be good in a limited situation in a 1v1. BUT, honestly, in any other setting, it fails. It could’ve been a buff to a PLAYER (that ally guard/rogue/ele/warrior slapping the enemy) that would utilize it much better than a clone.

Baa.4582:

Fury on the player does not affect illusion crit chance, unless that got changed in this patch too.

Illusions have always pulled their stats from your stats. It’s modified in real time. You can tell by illusion bleed procs and might or stacking sigils or anything of that nature.

Essentially, this makes Illusions have 2 buff bars. They have their own individual bars and then they also have your buff bar. Buffing yourself buffs them, but so does buffing them. You can utilize boon duration and Signet of Inspiration to make some nasty illusions, but it would be so extremely situational that it would be disgusting to set up.

Esplen.3940:

Baa.4582:

Fury on the player does not affect illusion crit chance, unless that got changed in this patch too.

Illusions have always pulled their stats from your stats. It’s modified in real time. You can tell by illusion bleed procs and might or stacking sigils or anything of that nature.

Essentially, this makes Illusions have 2 buff bars. They have their own individual bars and then they also have your buff bar. Buffing yourself buffs them, but so does buffing them. You can utilize boon duration and Signet of Inspiration to make some nasty illusions, but it would be so extremely situational that it would be disgusting to set up.

I’ve tested it before. Might and sigil stacks may carry over to illusions, but fury has to be on the phantasm to take effect. There isn’t much consistency here, like how condition/boon duration did not benefit illusions till last month. The best way is to test things out.

Someone else also tested it: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/How-does-might-work-with-illusions/2056309

For a phantasm build, the bouncing doesn’t seem bad for Greatsword. Basically, if I’m at long range on a single target and I have the zerker already cast, I’m going to give the zerker some extra might, and I’m going to hit the target a second time. So that’s better than what MirrorBlade did before.

If I have two phantasms out (assume one zerker and one duelist), then MirrorBlade should replace the existing MirrorBlade clone and probably bounce off the zerker. So, in that case, I would be losing some might on myself and on the duelist (assuming I would have been close enough before for the bounce to hit me). But if I’m fighting from long range, this is still better than I had before.

So it seems like this change is pretty much pure benefit if you stay at range with the greatsword and never get more than one clone out.

eldenbri.1059:

So it seems like this change is pretty much pure benefit if you stay at range with the greatsword and never get more than one clone out.

Except that this is purely from a solo-play perspective. In pvp, I doubt you will successfully keep further than 600range consistently. And, in both pvp and pve, other players are not getting buffs.

Extra thing to note, apparently engi turrets are “bounce-able” targets too. And its screwing their elixir bounces lol.

The change to bouncing attacks is freaking garbage! I used GS#2 3 times on a heavy golem not ONCE did I get a singe kittening stack of might. But I panned through the clones that spawned…. one had 12 stacks of might… HOW THE kitten IS THIS USEFUL TO US? Now our power might stacking weapon can’t even stack might? Are you freaking kidding me? Bounce logic needs to be ENEMY>PLAYER>ENEMY. Npc’s especially clones should never be in the kittening equation to get buffs.

Wow, this bouncing business is absolutely ridiculous. They just killed off all our bouncing attacks. Whoever is making these changes obviously don’t know the game. -_-

I can understand their intention…to allow attacks to bounce off clones so the bouncing attack will still hit the enemy if the player isn’t in range…but come on, not prioritizing the player over NPCs is a HUGE oversight…

These bouncing attacks must prioritise players over clones within a certain radius of the target. It’s very frustrating seeing the Might buff of Mirror Blade wasted on a clone when there’s a friendly player at the same attack range who could actually be helped by the buff.

As a condition Mesmer, I have to agree that this change is pretty brutal; I played around in WvW for several hours today and noticed that I was having a much harder time killing foes than normal. Normally I would have permanent Fury and ~5 stacks of Might but I rarely got any boons from WoC. Believe me, I tried positioning myself to get the boons, but a Mesmer has to move around so much to avoid damage that it’s nearly impossible to keep the boons on yourself. Dodge rolled away from an enemy? Well now there’s a clone up in its face stealing your boons. Phase retreated? Same thing. Used Decoy to gain a little distance? I think we can see a trend here. This is a devastating bug and needs to be fixed ASAP (along with many, many others).

That being said, this patch wasn’t all bad news. I did like that staff bounces could bounce from enemy to enemy without hitting an ally in-between. This was really useful in larger-scale fights and helps give condition builds some much-needed multi-target DPS. Also, I’m glad they fixed Prismatic Understanding with the The Prestige; having that extra second of breathing room allows more time to evade/wait for a heal to recharge/escape/get in place for the AoE fire blast.

Honestly though, it seems like something gets broken every patch. I love the game and am really supportive of ANet in general, but it genuinely concerns me that almost every patch there is some large bug that inadvertently pops up and then goes unfixed for weeks/months. There’s this, there’s the iZerker, there’s Arcane Thievery (still not fixed, despite claims that it was), there’s iLeap, there’s WoC not bouncing when cast by clones, etc. I would gladly accept a reduced amount of content if they could just iron out the bugs that run rampant. It’s not as bad as some games, but it’s still pretty frustrating.

One step ahead, 3 backwards, as usual.

Fix a thing, 3 gets broken.

Say it how you prefer, but it’s getting quite annoyin after 9 months…when this was intended to be the “bug fix patch”. Which fixes very few/lesser bugs, break new things and ignore important ones.

A few clarifications.

IE has always worked with iMage. It is only with Staff Clones that it doesn’t work.

Fury on yourself does not give your Illusions higher critical chance, and Might on your Illusions does not boost their damage. Only Might on yourself gives your Illusions higher damage, and only Fury on the Illusion gives it higher critical chance.

I have not checked this patch out myself yet, but if Clones are hogging all the bounces (negating IE’s double tap for your own WoC and wasting all the Might boons) then overall I’d say this patch is a nerf for condition Mesmers.

This has got to be the most heavily moderated forum i have ever been on.

After Playing for Thousands of hours for nine months i have come to the conclusion that this is just ‘politics’ what we are promised is far different from what we recieve.

BUG fixes?? Profession/ skill/ trait fixes???? Go on tell another joke- make me laugh some more.

I have not logged on (not even for my daily) for two weeks (yet spent time and money on other games).

After reading the patch notes i will not be logging in this month

In the end, I’ll keep on playing. But I’m more and more switching to an attitude where I just tell people not to start playing GW2 and complaining on the forums and in the chat more than actually playing, which is a bad sign and usually the end. The amount of "we don’t care" that ANet shows is just stunning. Same with right click targeting and stuff like that, it’s just pathetic and sad.

I’m spending more time on the forums with each passing patch, and the majority of it is due to QQing about bugs. Maybe several months from now, the forums will be full of bug reports instead of game/class discussions.

The bouncing change will screw me up on my staff shatter build. I don’t mind it on my phantasm build that I run. I ran GS-S/S last night in wvw and I’d never seen my iSwordsman hit so hard. Those stacks of might caused some brutal damage. Still, not many people run that setup (hell, even I rarely do), so it hurts other builds more than it helps the one I was running last night.

Ok I think I figured how what’s the new priority for bounce targets is.

Whoever or whatever is nearest will receive the bounce.

My staff WoC attack will always bounce to the nearest target. If that is another enemy, it will damage that enemy. If it’s me, I’ll get the boons. If it’s a clone, the clone will get the boons.

Subsequent bounces work the same way.

Pre-patch the bounce attacks went enemy —> ally --> enemy —> ally…

Example:
In a medium distance to a dummy golem, I place two clones next to each other.
Myself is standing at max range, shooting staff autoattacks (with IE traited)
The golem will be only hit once, but both clones get boons from bounces.
The bounces go: golem —> clone1 --> clone2

(hint: don’t use staff clones for this test, too much bounce attacks flying around. better use GS clones and switch to staff after you placed the clones.)

They should just change WOC to where you get no boons anymore and it adds more conditions to the enemy. That won’t happen. Hell they should just scrap Mesmer all together. This is getting ridiculous… now we have tons of traits that are useless… and I mean USELESS. Blinding befuddlement… nerfed into uselessness… dazzling glamours same…IE was prolly the GS last saving grace… now… useless. Greatsword training well with the new IE bug… its useless even more so. Any traits that focus on interrupts are a joke. Mantras still have no place in a competitive game (pvp). We have almost no reason to go 30 points into any line except illusions and maybe dueling but that isn’t for the grand master traits it’s to get another trait that was further down the line like duelists discipline or something….

What does ANET leave us with? We were supposed to be the boss of keeping boons up on ourselves with either the staff or GS… now neither give us boons…
BUT BUT BUT portal! NERFED…. You have clones though NO FAIR! yeah those 12 stacks of might on my stupid clone are really gonna win this battle…. Seriously ANET when are you gonna stop screwing this class over AND FIX IT?!

Embolism.8106:

A few clarifications.

IE has always worked with iMage. It is only with Staff Clones that it doesn’t work.

Fury on yourself does not give your Illusions higher critical chance, and Might on your Illusions does not boost their damage. Only Might on yourself gives your Illusions higher damage, and only Fury on the Illusion gives it higher critical chance.

I have not checked this patch out myself yet, but if Clones are hogging all the bounces (negating IE’s double tap for your own WoC and wasting all the Might boons) then overall I’d say this patch is a nerf for condition Mesmers.

It could possibly work for phants since they’d benefit from Staff boons, but said boons aren’t exactly persistent so keeping them on at just the right time for their attack cycle would be a bit of a chore at best.

Overall this is a huge shame if it’s really true, I used iElasticity so that Staff had some sort of pressure damage. Even then it necessitated me shadowing my target up close in melee to get the extra bounce off.

shimmerless.4560:

Embolism.8106:

A few clarifications.

IE has always worked with iMage. It is only with Staff Clones that it doesn’t work.

Fury on yourself does not give your Illusions higher critical chance, and Might on your Illusions does not boost their damage. Only Might on yourself gives your Illusions higher damage, and only Fury on the Illusion gives it higher critical chance.

I have not checked this patch out myself yet, but if Clones are hogging all the bounces (negating IE’s double tap for your own WoC and wasting all the Might boons) then overall I’d say this patch is a nerf for condition Mesmers.

It could possibly work for phants since they’d benefit from Staff boons, but said boons aren’t exactly persistent so keeping them on at just the right time for their attack cycle would be a bit of a chore at best.

Overall this is a huge shame if it’s really true, I used iElasticity so that Staff had some sort of pressure damage. Even then it necessitated me shadowing my target up close in melee to get the extra bounce off.

the might is as it should be…with signet of inspiration and winds of chaos (plus sigils and runes) it is not unreasonable to get 20-25 stacks of might and apply them in aoe. If phantasms got the power boost from you + might, it would be ridiculous.

Are you sure about the fury thing? I had heard otherwise from others on these forums.

I’ve notice the lack of the bouncing boons in the staff and trident. Now, you don’t have any control about your bouncing boons, the nearest ally (you, clone, phantasm or other) to your target will take that boon. And if you have some clones/phantasm alive on the enemy and other allies are there while you at range, even inside the bounce range , you are no going to see any boon from your bouncing skills. Even if you are there, on the target at 0 distance, when you can stay on enemy (light armor) you are only going to see your bouncing boons on you if you’re lucky. The only thing that you can do is try to stay above your target and see if you get some, with all in movement sure that you have some luck at times. In the middle of a fight at the end you’ll get some but nothing compared like before.

Take off traits and sigils that give you boons and try to stack them from your bouncing skills against, at least, veterans and with some friends that help you to test it without give you their boons. You’ll find the most diferent (before patch) against the most harder mobs, like champions, which is obvious because you can’t stay on them all time, like other professions, while you see your boons flying to them all time. At the end, your clones/phantasms die or be shattered while your bouncing skills continue spreading boons, about all from staff and trident, but now, not for you…. The most tanky allies (usually others) that are permanently on the enemies and on your targets will always take the most of bouncing boons with the actual system. It’s simple.

The most curious that I’ve been testing is that, for example, if I put two clones/phantasm at the same distance of my target or 0 and then I use my staff 1 bouncing them. The nearest illusion to me take the boon or the boon first, you can move yourself around your illusions and see
Another thing that can you test is that now, if there isn’t a ally inside bounce range, skills bounce between enemies.

At least before the patch you could enter in bounce range and take boons if needed or take breath away and give boons to your allies.

Regards